The Apple Trees at Olema (13 page)

Howard, one child on his shoulder,

another trotting beside him, small hand

in his hand, is going to write a book—

“Miranda, stop pulling Daddy's hair”—about

the invention of the family in medieval France.

The ritual hikes of Memorial Day: adults

chatting in constantly re-forming groups,

men with men, women with women, couples,

children cozened along with orange sections

and with raisins, running ahead, and back,

and interrupting. Long views through mist

of the scaly brightness of the ocean,

the massive palisade of Point Reyes cliffs.

“I would have thought,” a woman friend says,

peeling a tangerine for Howard whose hands

are otherwise employed, cautioning a child

to spit out all the seeds, “that biology

invented the family.” A sudden upward turn

of the trail, islands just on the horizon,

blue. “Well,” he says, “I think it's useful

to see it as a set of conventions.”

Someone's great-aunt dies. Someone's sister's

getting married in a week. The details are comic.

But we dress, play flutes, twine flowers,

and read long swatches from the Song of Songs

to celebrate some subtle alteration

in a cohabitation that has, probably, reached a crisis

and solved it with the old idea of these vows.

To vow, and tear down time: one of the lovers gives up

an apartment, returned to and stripped piecemeal

over months or years, until one maidenhair fern

left by the kitchen window as a symbol, dwindling,

of the resilience of a solitary life

required watering. Now it too is moved.

Summer solstice: parents, if their children

are young enough, put them to bed before dark,

then sit to watch the sun set on the bay.

A woman brings her coffee to the view.

Dinner done. What was she thinking

before her mother called, before the neighbor

called about the car pool? Something,

something interesting. The fog flares

and smolders, salmon first, then rose,

and in the twilight the sound comes up

across the neighborhood backyards of a table

being set. other lives with other schedules.

Then dark, and, veering eerily, a bat.

Body half-emerged from the bright blue cocoon

of the sleeping bag, he wakes, curled hand

curling toward the waves of his sister's

cut-short, slept-on and matted, cornfield-

colored hair. She stirs a little in her sleep.

Her mother, whose curved brow her brow exactly

echoes, stirs. What if the gnostics had it backward?

What if eternity is pure destruction? The child,

rubbing his eyes, stares drowsily at the sea,

squints at his father who is sitting up,

shivers from his bag, plods up the beach

to pee against the cliff, runs back, climbs in

with his mother, wriggles close. In a minute

he'll be up again, fetching driftwood for a fire.

Leif comes home from the last day of his sophomore year.

I am sitting on the stoop by our half-dug,

still-imagined kitchen porch, reading

Han dynasty rhyme-prose. He puts a hand on my shoulder,

grown to exactly my height and still growing.

“Dad,” he says, “I'm not taking any more

of this tyrannical bullshit.” I read to him

from Chia Ya:
The great man is without bent
,

a million changes are as one to him
.

He says, “And another thing, don't lay

your Buddhist trips on me.”
The span of life is fated
;

man cannot guess its ending
.

In stillness like the stillness of deep springs
…

In the kitchen he flips the lid

of the blueberry yogurt. I am thinking

this project is more work than I want.

Joining, scattering, ebbing and flowing
,

where is there persistence, where is there rule
?

“Bullshit,” he mutters, “what is the existential reality”—

he has just read Nausea in advanced English—

“of all this bullshit, Todo?”

Todo is the dog. It occurs to me

that I am not a very satisfying parent

to rebel against.
Like an unmoored boat

drifting aimlessly, not even valuing

the breath of life, the wise man

embraces nothing, and drifts with it
.

I look at his long body in a chair

and wonder if I'd tell him to embrace the void.

I think he will embrace a lover soon.

I want the stars to terrify him once. I want him

to weep bitterly when his grandfather dies,

hating the floral carpet, hating it that his old aunts

have become expert at this event.

I would ward off, if I could, the thicket

of grief on grief in which Chia Ya

came to entire relinquishment as to a clearing.

Digging again, I say, “You know, I started this job

and I hate it already, and now I have to finish.”

He leans against the doorpost with a spoon.

Takes a mouthful. “Well, Pop,” he says, “that's life.”

Children stroll down to the lakeside

on a path already hot from the morning sun

and known well by them in its three turnings—

one by the sugar pine gouged with rusty nails

where summers past they put a hammock or a swing,

one by the thimbleberry where the walk seems driest,

dust heaviest on the broad soft leaves, and bees—

you have to be careful—are nuzzling in the flowers,

one by the aspens where the smell of water

starts and the path opens onto sand, the wide blue lake,

mountains on the farther shore. The smaller boy

has line, a can for crawfish, and an inner tube.

He's nursing a summer cold. His older brother's

carrying a book, a towel, a paper on
Medea

his girlfriend has mailed to him from summer school.

The girl has several books, some magazines.

She loves her family, but she 's bored. She 'd rather

be in town where her friends are, where her real life

has begun. They settle on the beach.

Cold water, hot sun, the whole of an afternoon.

1.

Sunlight on the streets in afternoon

and shadows on the faces in the open-air cafés.

What for? Wrong question. You knock

without knowing that you knocked. The door

opens on a century of clouds and centuries

of centuries of clouds. The bird sings

among the toyons in the spring's diligence

of rain.
And then what? Hand on your heart.

Would you die for spring? What would you die for?

Anything?

Anything. It may be I can't find it

and they can, the spooners of whipped cream

and espresso at the sunny tables, the women

with their children in the stores.
You want to sing?

Tra-la. Empty and he wants to sing.

A pretty river, but there were no fish.

Smart fish. They will be feeding for a while.

He wants to sing
. Yes, poverty or death.

Piety or death, you meant, you dope.
You fool,

“bloody little fool.” She slammed the door.

He was, of course, forlorn. And lorn and afterlorn.

It made a busy afternoon. The nights were difficult.

No doors, no drama. The moon ached aimlessly.

Dogs in the morning had their dog masks on.

It did not seem good, the moths, the apples
?

The gold meander in her long brown hair

cast one vote then, sinuous as wrists. He attended

to her earnestness as well—and the child liked breakfast.

He believed in that. Every day was a present

he pretended that he brought. The sun came up.

Nothing to it. I'll do it again tomorrow,

and it did. Sundays he fetched croissants,

the frank nipples of brioche that say it's day,

eat up, the phone will ring, the mail arrive.

Someone who heard you sing the moths, the apples

and they were—for sure they were, and good

though over there. Gold hair. A lucky guy

with a head on his shoulders, and all heart.

You can skip this part
. The moths, the apples,

and the morning news. Apartheid, terror,

boys in a jungle swagging guns.
Injustice

in tropical climates is appalling,

and it does do you credit to think so
.

I knew that I had my own work to do.

The ones who wear the boots decide all that.

He wants to sing one thing so true that it is true.

I cast a vote across the river, skipped another

on the pond. It skittered for a while triumphantly,

then sank. And we were naked on the riverbank.

I believed a little in her breasts, the color

of the aureoles that afternoon, and something

she said about her sister that seemed shrewd.

Afterward we watched a woman making masks,

mostly with feathers and a plaster cast of face

she glued them to. The mouths formed cries.

They were the parts that weren't there—implied

by what surrounded them. They were a cunning

emptiness.
I think you ought to start again.

The fish were smart. They mouthed the salmon eggs,

or so you felt. The boys kept reeling in.

Casting and reeling in. You'll never catch a fish

that way, you said. one caught a fish that way.

one perched in a chair abandoned on the sand.

Drank orange soda, watched his rod twitter

in the fork of a willow twig. “I'm getting a bite, Dad.”

It was the river current or the wind. In every

language in the world, I bet.
Do you believe

in that
? Not especially. It means the race is old.

And full of hope?
He wants to sing.

You bastard, she said, and slammed the door.

You've been in this part already. Say “before.”

“Before.” She shut the door. It couldn't have been

otherwise. How sick you were. The mouths, the apples,

the buttons on a blouse. The bone was like pearl,

and small, and very shiny. The fat child's face

was flecked with Santa Rosa plum. She cried.

Her mother hit her. Then it seemed like blood.

A flood of tears, then. You remembered

never to interfere. It humiliates them.

They beat the child again when they get home.

It's only your feeling you assuage.

You didn't interfere. Her gold wandering of hair,

she told you that another time. The father

at the county fair was whaling on the boy

with fists. There was music in the background

and a clown walked by and looked and looked away.

She told you then, gold and practical advice.

You wanted one and craved the other.

Say “mother.” No. Say it. No. She shut the door
?

I wish she had. I saw the shadow cast there

on the floor.
What did you think?
I asked her,

actually. She said she hurt her lip. And

took a drink? or the shadow did. I didn't think.

I knew she was lying. A child could see that.

You were a child. Ah, this is the part

where he parades his wound. He was a child.

It is the law of things: the little billy goat

goes first. Happily, he 's not a morsel

for the troll.
Say “Dad, I've got a bite.”

That's different. Then you say, “Reel it in.”

They're feeling fear and wonder, then.

That's when you teach them they can take the world

in hand.
You do
? Sometimes I do. Carefully.

They beat the child again when they get home.

All right. Assume the children are all right.

They're singing in the kibbutzim. The sun is rising.

Let's get past this part. The kindergarten

is a garden and they face their fears in stories

your voice makes musical and then they sleep.

They hear the sirens?
Yes, they hear the sirens.

That part can't be helped. No one beats them, though.

And there are no lies they recognize. They know

you're with them and they fall asleep. What then?

Get past this part. It is a garden. Then they're grown.

What then? Say “groan.” I say what to say,

you don't. They're all OK, and grown. What then?

2.

Then? Then, the truth is, then they fall in love.

oh no. Oh yes. Big subject.
Big shadow
.

I saw it slant across the floor, linoleum

in fact, and very dirty. Sad and dirty.

Because it lacked intention
? Well, it did lack art.

Let's leave the shadow part alone. They fall in love.

What then
? I want to leave this too.

It has its songs. Too many. I know them all.

It doesn't seem appropriate somehow. It was summer.

He saw her wandering through a field of grass.

It was the sweetest fire. Later, in the fall, it rained.

You loved her then
? In rain? and gold October?

I would have died for her.
Tra-la
. oh yes,

tra-la. We took long walks. You gather sadness

from a childhood to make a gift of it.

I gave her mine.
Some gift
. Is it so bad?

Sadness is a pretty word
. Shadow's

shadow. And once there was a flood. Heavy rains,

and then the tide came in. I left her house

at midnight. It was pouring. I hitched a ride,

which stalled. The car in front of us had stopped.

The water rose across the road and ran downhill.

You'd forgotten this
. I remember now. My knee

was in a cast. I hopped to the car in front,

the one that stalled. The driver's tongue stuck out,

a pale fat plum. His eyes bulged. An old man

in a gray felt hat. And the red lids flickered,

so he wasn't dead.
What did you do
? Got in,

shoved him aside, and tried to start the car.

What did you feel then
? Wonderful. Like cleaning fish.

Your hands are bloody and you do the job.

It reminds you of a poem now
? Yes,

the one about the fall that Bashō liked.

“The maple leaf becomes a midwife 's hand.”

The engine skipped and sank, twice. Then it started.

And I drove. The hospital was just a mile away

but near the creek. I thought the water

would be even higher.
Interesting, of course.

This is the part about falling in love
?

I left her house. We were necking, remember,

on a soft green velvet couch.
What then
?

I took the downhill road and floored it.

A gush spewed up and blurred the windshield.

I couldn't see a thing. The car sputtered,

surged, sputtered, surged, and died. And

he was dead.
Who was he
? Some old man.

That was the winter that you fell in love
?

It
was. Did you feel bad
? No, I tried.

Do you believe in that
? Now? I'm not sure.

He looked like a baby when they got him out

and raindrops bounced off raindrops on his face.

It didn't cost me anything.